sunlight and freshness; full, too, of a finer mystery
than ever Weber dreamed of—the mystery
with which the most delicate German imagination invested
the broad rivers that flowed through the black forests
from some far-away land of unchangeable stillness and
beauty, some “land of eternal dawn,” as
Wagner calls it. No more Mozartean music is in
existence, save Mozart’s own, than that first
act of “Lohengrin,” where Wagner, by dint
of being Weberish, came nearer to Mozart than ever
Weber came; for Weber never wrote anything which,
regarded as absolute music, apart from its emotional
significance, or the picture it suggests to the inner
eye, is so purely beautiful as, for instance, the
bit of chorus sung after Lohengrin concludes his little
arrangement with Elsa. Both the first and the
second acts are full of such melodies, any two of
which would prove Wagner to be the greatest melody-writer
of the century; and those critics who say that Verdi
is greater because his melodies are more like Mozart’s
in form, would have said, had they lived last century,
that Salieri was greater than Mozart because Salieri’s
melodies were more like Hasse’s in form.
Perhaps the last act might be quite as exquisite on
the stage, for it is even more exquisite in the score;
but that we shall not know until our operatic singers
abandon their vanity and their melodrama, and by reading
an occasional book, and sometimes going out into the
world, learn how much they themselves would gain if
they always worked with artistic sincerity.
All art forms are conventions, and all conventions
appear ridiculous when they are superseded by new
ones. The old Italian opera form is laughed at
to-day as an absurdity by Wagnerians, who see nothing
absurd in a many-legged monster with a donkey’s
head uttering deep bass curses through a speaking-trumpet;
and perhaps to-morrow the Wagnerian music-drama and
the many-legged monsters will be laughed at by the
apostles of a new and equally absurd convention.
It is absolutely the first condition of the existence
of an art that one shall be prepared to tolerate things
ludicrously unlike anything to be found in real life;
and when (for instance) you have swallowed the camel
of allowing the heroes and heroines to sing their woes
at all, it is a little foolish to strain at the gnat
of permitting them to sing in this rather than in
that way, when both ways are alike preposterous.
It is not, therefore, on the score of its inherent
absurdity that I should throw brickbats at Italian
opera, any more than with the female dress of to-day
before my eyes I should insist that the women who
wore the fashions of ten years ago were only fit to
be incarcerated in a lunatic asylum; knowing, as I
do, that the dress of ten years ago was not—and
could not be—more absurd than the dress
of to-day. The only reasonable objection that
can be brought against Italian opera is that when
it is sincere it offers what no one wants, and that
when it tries to offer what everyone wants it is not
sincere. I cannot quite understand what this
means, but will endeavour to explain.
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